Chicken flooring has traditionally been made of wire mesh or from wooden or steel slats spaced from one another to allow droppings and other waste material to pass through the flooring. These traditional types of flooring have a number of serious disadvantages. One is that the animal droppings cause deterioration of the flooring; wire mesh or steel flooring members corrode rapidly while wooden members rot. Wooden flooring members also tend to encourage bacteria growth under the relatively moist conditions often found in a chicken coop or the like. Steel flooring has the further problem that heat is rapidly conducted away from the animals, which may affect their health, particularly where the flooring is used in a rearing pen for young animals.
Traditional flooring systems have the still further drawback that the flooring often cannot be readily repaired in localized areas which might be subjected to greater than average wear. For example, at an entrance to a pen, the flooring will often tend to wear more rapidly than elsewhere but, with traditional flooring, it is difficult to repair only the localized worn area. Rather, it may be necessary to replace the entire floor.
Proposals have been made to use modular plastic flooring units, for example in hog barns and other enclosures for relatively large animals. Our U.S. Pat. No. 4,329,939 discloses examples of modular flooring units of this type, designed primarily for hog barns. These units are relatively ruggedly constructed and, while they certainly could be used as chicken flooring, they are somewhat more substantial than would normally be required for this application.